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“... Rousset, Jean-Pierre Richard, Jean Starobinski and Gaston Bachelard, I am reminded of a passage in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Marcel Raymond I read first in the English translation, published in 1950, of De Baudelaire au Surréalisme. It became immediately a precious book for me, both as an evidence of the power of poetry and as evidence of a power in ...”

“... has been some Christian vicar or nature study slant: he has edited selections from Wordsworth and George Herbert and compiled a Penguin Book of Religious Verse. Out of church, he has kept fairly silent, confining his enthusiasms to co-Celts like Yeats and Mac-Diarmid and to the odd American, like Wallace Stevens. Thomas’s ...”

“... The world, the flesh and the devil keep coming back, and must be rejected again and again. George Herbert’s poems vividly describe the inner weather of Christian devotion. It’s all there: self-abasement before God; horror at his absence; meditation on the boundless enormity of sin; meditation on the boundless generosity of Christ’s ...”

“... but only one poem attributed to John Donne; seven poems by William Drummond, but just one by George Herbert; more than ninety men, but just five women (three of them Scots); far more poems by Wordsworth than by anybody else.Palgrave assembled his anthology while working in London as a civil servant at the Education Office. Bucknell speculates that for ...”

“... a broken neck.Millay rose to fame while still in her twenties. She beat Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens for the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Although she became a proselytiser in her last decade, devoted to progressive causes to which she fitted her verses (‘not poems, posters,’ she admitted), she was still in demand for lectures and recitations, and had ...”

“... by writers and critics. It wasn’t just the usual modernist suspects like Pound, Williams, Stevens and Marianne Moore who sang his praises, but other, very different kinds of poet too: Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, Octavio Paz, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson. As did any number of critics: Edmund Wilson, Harry Levin, Jacques Barzun, Lionel ...”

“... and at his best when reviewing poetry. His essays on Sterne, Austen, Hardy, Trollope, Dickens, George Eliot and others begin incisively and then drift sideways, as critical argument is forsaken for biographical chatter and a widespread sowing of the field with puffed wheat. There is always a remarkably serene sense of what an author would and wouldn’t ...”

“... most published since, is to describe the modern world as it was, and in some measure still is. In George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air, published in 1939, the dyspeptic hero, George Bowling, finds himself at one point in a fast-food outlet sawing away with his ancient false teeth at the rubbery skin of a ...”

“... of the others. The fourth face was for ever left starkly blank, as if to advertise the absence of George Soane, the younger son, whose vicious newspaper attacks on his father’s architecture – and character – were often said to have hastened Eliza’s end. (It is a measure of Soane’s narcissistic vindictiveness that for several years he hung framed ...”

“... off well: it makes a first-rate anthology. There are a number of poems, by Suckling, Henry King, George Farewell, Andrew Young, which will probably be new to the reader, and which will certainly produce ‘the illusion that it was written specially for me’. There are well-known favourites too, like Housman’s ‘Bredon Hill’ and Flecker’s ‘Golden ...”

“... into her ear ... ’ The fictiveness of the real is a favourite theme with Americans, from Wallace Stevens to Harold Robbins. They are afraid they live in a world they have made up, and made up badly, so that a soap opera, for example, may be seen not as an escape but as a secret verdict, a last metaphor for a bungled invention. Vidal knows this very well, and ...”

“... successors, the amiable if cack-handed Victor Matthews, his feverish mayor of the palace, Jocelyn Stevens, and subsequent persons deepening the descent, still aspired to Beaverbrook’s peremptory ways, his habit of punting enthusiasms and nominating heroes. All that was missing was the flair. One can’t see Beaverbrook tolerating an instruction to ...”

“... were invited back merely to keep her company. Her biggest Hollywood affair post-Sinatra was with George C. Scott, the most ghastly of all her lovers. Gardner had no private life. Her failed marriage to Sinatra inspired In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning, one of the great heartbreak records. Nelson Riddle said that Sinatra’s voice at this period was ...”

“... or translating Rimbaud. Meanwhile, pioneering scholars like Barbara Tuchman, Frank Manuel and George Whalley mined gold year after year from the lodes of ore in the libraries.The roots of this bookish postwar New York, as Denise Gigante shows in Book Madness, stretched back deep into the 19th century. Some of them also nourished Boston’s book culture ...”

“... so on. A truly terrible essay in Lodge’s collection Write on, in which he attends a Shakin’ Stevens teenybop gig ‘struck by the Christian symbolism permeating the whole event’, suggests he was right not to push his luck with Sheldrake’s musings, even for comic purposes. An American art critic featured on a recent TV documentary about Madonna and ...”